Here are my credentials: I am on my 3rd kid in college and I am an IT professional (web developer).
The first one we bought a $200-250 chromebook and that has been great for her. She is now graduated (elementary ed) and still uses the chromebook and loves it.
The second one we bought a $250 refurbished windows laptop. It is clunky and the battery is no good but for just leaving it plugged-in in her apartment it works fine for what she needs. She is a vocal performance major. If the laptop dies before she graduates we will probably get her a chromebook.
The third is a business management major. She actually needs to use excel and other windows programs for her classes so she needed a windows laptop and one that had a battery that worked. We just bought a $300 refurbished laptop ($400 new) for her and it arrives on Monday. Hopefully it will do what she needs. The minimum specs I was looking for were these: Core i5 processor or better, 8+ GB ram, 256 GB SSD or 500 GB HDD (not both - you only want one drive), and Win 10.
My general recommendation is if the kid will not need windows-specific software and will only be using the laptop for writing papers and things like that, get a chromebook. They are much cheaper and less complicated to use for the average non-techy person, and they tend to have much better battery life than windows laptops.
If the kid needs to do actual work on the laptop go with the specs I used for kid #3. If the kid needs to run processor intensive software (like for software development) then you may have to go even higher with the specs but I would really be surprised if the Core i5 would not cover all the college stuff.
You can save $100-150 going with a refurb instead of new if you want - it depends on your comfort level. And I would stay away from touch-screen laptops because their batteries tend to drain faster than non-touch-screen laptops.